in summer, allowing two hours for meals and a rest at noon; they are from eight to four, in winter, allowing the same time for meals, but no rest at noon. The price of labour is continually increasing. Men get, during the harvest, one shilling per day, and women, ten-pence, besides provisions: and the quantity of work effected is very inferior to that of the opposite shores. A ploughman expects from eight to ten guineas a-year, and a boy three. Some of the experienced Scotch labourers have been procured at double wages, and found a great acquisition to the farmers.

The labouring class of people live upon butter-milk, potatoes, barley-cakes, stir-about, and herrings. The barley-meal is kneaded with a very little water, and rolled to the thickness of one-sixth of an inch. It is then baked upon a plate of iron over a peat fire, and usually has a stronger flavour of smoke than of barley. Oatmeal is occasionally, but not very often, substituted. Leavened bread is little known and little liked. Stir-about, well known in Ireland, is composed of oatmeal and water boiled: this is their common breakfast: herrings are a frequent part of their dinner, salted, not dried: and their

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last meal is either stir-about, or potatoes and milk. A labourer usually has a piece of potatoe ground, and sometimes a cow.

Much land has been improved by draining, and a good deal more requires it. The covered drains are usually two feet nine inches deep, nine inches wide at bottom, and two feet at top. They are filled up one-half with stones, and on them a layer, either of straw, or neatly pared turf, to prevent the mould from getting in. On stiff clayey land they have been constructed, and found to answer, without stones, the drain being narrower, and the turf resting upon a ledge on each side. The ditches are, in general, too shallow, and not kept clean. A northern tract of two thousand acres, six miles long, has been converted from a marsh to arable and pasture land by a drain of ten feet wide and six deep. The soil is peat-moss and clay. When I saw it (in 1808) the drain was full to the brim, with marshy land about it, and seemed to require clearing. There are several other open drains.

For a manure farmers rely chiefly on farmyard dung, and, if near the shore, on sea-weed. The latter is either used immediately for corn or potatoes, or forms a part of a valuable compost.

For barley it is particularly useful; but is totally expended by a second crop. Plough oxen, steers, heifers, and dry cattle consume the oat and barley straw. The aged cattle are kept in houses the young, in yards or the corners of dry pastures, with the liberty of ranging the fields in the day-time. Lime is an excellent and durable manure upon soils of clay or peat; but the expence of quarrying and of burning it prevents its being greatly used. The sweepings of the herring houses, were it not for their limited application, would be very profitable to the farmer. A soil of sand is highly improved by a layer of the clay found a few feet beneath the surface. From three to four hundred loads, of ten hundred weight each, are put upon every acre. After it is crumbled to pieces by the winter rains and frosts, the land is put in tillage. The northern flat is rendered by this treatment the most fertile of any in the island. Its chief produce is barley, a considerable portion of which is sent annually to Douglas.

Arable land is laid out in ridges of various sizes: those of peas, wheat, or oats, from four to nine feet wide; of barley, from twelve to twenty feet. High ridges are never used, the

depth of soil being seldom sufficient to admit them.

A regular rotation of crops is little understood or practised. The one most approved is this: the first crop, potatoes or turnips, well manured; the second, barley; the third, clover; the fourth, oats; sometimes, if good land, wheat; the fifth, peas, or oats, if wheat has gone before. A poor soil, after having sustained two or three rotations, is often suffered to stock itself with natural grasses. This is the work of several years. For a few years more it is surrendered to pasture, and then subjected to another rotation of crops. Heathy land, not being sandy, is improved mostly with thorough fallowing and liming, and, after a few crops, is sown with grass seeds: but, unless these soils have frequent dressings and tillage, they return to their original state. Summer fallowing is little practised.

The cultivation of wheat is not general, chiefly on account of its being subject to the smut in this climate. The red sort of seed is the most common, and is usually sown immediately after the potatoes are dug up, in November or December. The return is, usually, from twentyfour to thirty-six bushels per acre. It is always

sold by the actual weight of sixty-four pounds to the estimated bushel. Five thousand pounds' worth of flour is annually imported. About half the corn land is used in the cultivation of barley. Two sorts are sown, the four-rowed, which is fit only for malt; and the two-rowed, the meal of which is used for the unleavened bread. The four-rowed requires the earliest sowing, and is ripe a fortnight before the other sort. Seed time is from the middle of April to the middle of May. The usual allowance of seed per acre is from three and a half to four and a half bushels, and the average return, thirty-six. Nearly the other half of corn land is used in the cultivation of oats. Two sorts are sown, the white and the Poland. The first, being hardy and not very liable to shake, is generally preferred. Seed time is from the beginning of March to the middle of April. The allowance of seed is five or six bushels per acre, and the average return thirty. Beans are not much cultivated, owing to the lateness and wetness of the harvest. Grey and white peas are in common use, and are sown in the month of April. The allowance of seed is two and a half bushels per acre, and the return about twenty bushels. This is a crop

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